CHAPTER 27
Lying in the blind darkness of my cell, waiting for Set to send me on my mission of murder, it seemed as if the heated stones beneath me were slowly cooling. The very air I breathed seemed not as hot as it had been moments before, as if my physical torment was being eased in reward for my capitulating to Set’s will.
I did not feel him in ray mind, yet I knew he must be there, watching, waiting, ready to control my body.
I felt a hollow sinking sensation within my chest, my belly. The floor seemed to be descending, very slowly at first, then faster and faster. Like an elevator plunging out of control. I sensed myself falling through the inky blackness, the stones beneath me growing colder as I descended.
Then came that wrenching moment of absolute cold, of nothingness, when all the dimensions of time and space seem to disappear. I hung suspended in nowhere, without form or feeling, in a limbo where time itself did not exist. A billion years could have passed, or a billionth of a second.
Brilliant golden radiance lanced through me like spears of molten metal. I squeezed my eyes shut and threw my hands over my face. Tears spurted down my cheeks.
I still could not see; first I had been blind from lack of light, now I was blinded by too much of it. I lay curled in a fetal position, head tucked down, arms across my face. Nothing stirred. Not a breeze, not a bird or a cricket or a rustling leaf. I listened to my own heart pulsing feebly in my ears. I began counting. Fifty beats. A hundred. A hundred fifty…
“Orion? Can it be you?”
Weakly I raised my head. The golden light was still blindingly bright. Squinting against the overpowering radiance, I saw the lean form of a man standing over me.
“Help me,” I pleaded in a hoarse whisper. “Help me.”
He hunkered down on his haunches beside me. Either my eyes began to adjust to the light or it somehow dimmed. My eyes stopped tearing. The world began to come into unblurred focus for me.
“How did you get here? And in such condition!”
Danger, I wanted to say. Every instinct in me wanted to scream out an alarm that would alert him and the other Creators. But my voice froze in my throat.
“Help me,” was all I could croak.
The man crouching beside me was the one I thought of as Hermes. Greyhound lean in body and limbs, his face was a set of narrow V’s: pointed chin, slanting cheekbones, pointed hairline above a smooth forehead.
“Stay where you are,” he told me. “I’ll bring help.”
He vanished. As if he had been nothing more than an image on a screen, he simply disappeared from my sight.
Weakly I pushed myself up to a sitting position. I remembered this place from other existences. An expanse of unguessable extent, the ground covered with softly billowing mist, the sky above me a calm clear blue darkening at zenith enough to show a few scattered stars. Or were they stars? They did not twinkle at all in this silent, motionless world.
I had met the Golden One here many times. And Anya too. That is why Set had returned me to this spot. As I looked around now, it seemed artificial to me, like a stage setting or an elaborately constructed shrine meant to overawe ignorant visitors. A bogus representation of the Christian heaven, a bourgeois Valhalla. The kind of setting that the Assassins of old Persia would have used to convince their drug-dazed recruits that paradise awaited them—except that the old Assassins would have stocked the place with graceful dancing girls and beautiful houris.
I realized that I was seeing this place of the Creators through Set’s cynical mind. He was within me as truly as my own blood and brain. He had prevented me from crying out a warning to Hermes.
The air seemed to glow again, and I squeezed my eyes shut once more.
“Orion.”
Opening my eyes, I saw Hermes and two others with him: the grave, dark-bearded one I called Zeus, and a slender breathtakingly beautiful blonde woman of such sweetness and grace that she could only be Aphrodite. All three of the Creators were physically perfect, each in their own way. The men were in glittering metallic suits that fit their forms like second skins, from polished boot tops to high collars. Aphrodite wore a softly pleated robe of apricot pink, fastened at one shoulder by a golden clasp. Her arms and legs were bare, her skin flawless, glowing.